Hello 2016 New Year, new plans...

I'm sorry...

Within days of each other, I received a couple of very polite emails from Nathan and Genevieve's teachers, they both wanted to know how everything is going.  No we did not fall off the face of the earth, but we did take a very long extended Christmas break.  Jeff arrived home December 8th, and we took off the entire 5 weeks he was home.  I am sorry Rebecca, and Rachel, I know I wasn't very communicative even in November!  I was trying to hurry and get our work done before Jeff arrived home.  This plan also failed and we still have a few days left to finish our novel My Side of the Mountain.

I just realized that two of my posts were only drafts and were not posted as well!  you must have really thought I had given up :)

5 week Christmas Break!

My plan for Jeff being home was that the first few weeks before Christmas we were going to spend everyday making homemade Christmas presents.   What I failed to remember is that the last few weeks before Christmas we have things all the time! Recitals, concerts, performances coming at us from everywhere!  So homemade Christmas was a good idea, here I thought oh how fun, we wont be doing actual school work, but we will be doing woodworking and baking, and lots of crafting.  We did some wood working, I found a neat book at the library on making toys, the kids each made a penny shooter, but we didn't finish them, they have to be assembled and painted.  We still did manage to make some homemade gifts and both Nathan and Genevieve were really happy to be able to give those away.

Even though we were busy this Christmas break it felt like a long time Jeff was home (in a good way Jeff, although it is nice to be back to normal too!).  I felt like I had 5 weeks to recover, and feel pretty refreshed.  Although we didn't do any formal schooling, our lives are always filled with watching documentaries, going to see the Alberta ballet perform the nutcracker at the Queen Elizabeth theatre, going to Canuck's games, sledding and frolicking in the snow, and of course Drs appointments.

Suzy Snowflake costume for Voice recital

Back

He's still so cute

Reimer family dinner

christmas morning

Christmas diner with the Bourquin's very relaxed day

canucks skills competition

awww

We so handsome!  Post Nutcraker, all of us agreed that the previous time we have seen the alberta balet nutcraker was superior.  We still enjoyed the performance.

Optomitrist - 6 years of struggles answered with an eye exam

We had an interesting appointment with Dr. Johal at Panorama optometry.  Nathan has very mildy complained about difficulties with reading since he started reading.  He has mentioned these problems mildly to both the pediatric opthalmologist, and his optomitrist, that he sees yearly for checkups.  I remember that he told the opthalmologist that it feels like his eyes go cross-eyed sometimes, or that his eyes feel like they are moving themselves.  He has complained that he feels nauseous when he reads, this was improved when he began taking his betablockers, but did not completely disappear.  Nathan had a complete assessment at the office and Jeff and I were both asked to come back in to go over the results.  Dr Johal spent at least 1 hour going over all of Nathans results.  I was shocked when we looked at his results.  Honestly I have no idea how he has been reading!  We got to watch a video that showed where his eyes were when he was reading, he was jumping up down and back and forth all over the page.  You could see how many times he lost his place and had to go back.  He skipped words often.  His tracking was terrible.  Next she talked about divergence and convergence.  He has problems with both.  The convergence will affect his reading more, but his divergence is what makes it impossible for him to see 1 image when he looks through a microscope or binoculars. As a side note I have this difficulty as well, and I have asked many optomitrists why this is and no one was able to give me an answer, and here it seemed pretty basic!  A few other things, when Nathan is reading close up, he sees double, he says that it isnt a big deal because he has always been able to figure out what image is the real one!  When nathan is reading he also sees in 3D, so the words actually lift off the page, he also says its not a big deal, it is only the words at the sides of the page, if he is looking at the words straight ahead they stay on the page.  All of these issues point to weak muscles of the eye, the Dr said that the eye is full of connective tissue, and because Nathans connective tissue is faulty, he is having issues.  Another thing I was not expecting to hear was that Nathan tested 2% in visual memory.  The Dr said this could be a cognitive deficiency, or it could be because Nathan has not had the proper visual imput in order to form a visual memory.  She asked Jeff and I if Nathan was having difficulties with basic math fact
 memorization, and then asked if he excelled at advanced mathmatics.  I think we both started laughing and said yes big time yes, but how do you know that?  She explained to us that basic math facts require a visual memory when you are asked what is 5+3, you see in your head 5+3=8 a visual memory.  Nathan does not have this!  This is why Nathan has been loving word problems all this time, the word problems help him form a picture.  Why oh why did I not switch to life of fred sooner!!!  all word problems.

So here is the game plan with vision.  She said she would like to increase all of Nathan's scores to catch up to the rest of him.  He scored in the 90's in every other test, so she would like to get Nathans scores up to the 90th percentile, not just 50th.  She figures this will require weekly appts for at least 9 months.  We also have to do home therapy 5 days a week.   But she was adamant that she will fix nathan.  Her confidence scared my slightly, as well I have been trained to doubt someone who gives a 100% guarantee!

How vision is going so far...  We had our first appt last week.  Nathan came out of the appointment happy.  He liked his therapist, at first she talked down to him he reports, but then she started talking normaly.  I had a few minutes alone with her and she said she changed how she was talking to him, when he started explaining to her what was going on with his vision, when he was able to tell her he was seeing in 3D and he used the word divergent.  She figured it out on her own that it was better to explain to him, exactly what the exercises were accomplishing.  Nathan is doing wonderful so far on the home therapy, he is asking me to do it everyday, even though it hurts his eyes and makes him queasy.  I am so glad I do not have to fight him on this, and hopefully he will start seeing some changes and that will help him continue on.  I have put it in our schedule as pirate training as Nathan wears a patch for some of his exercises, he thought that was quite funny.

So the good
-Yeah hopefully this will help nathan in so many ways!

The bad
- its in Surrey a 1 hour drive each way every monday
- another activity to get done in our already very hectic schedule

Scheduling

So with this New Year I really had to look at our schedule and figure out how we were going to do it all.  And it became clear there was no way we could.  So we have decided to make a few changes.  We have decided to no longer have an EA on Fridays, we need this funding $ to pay for vision therapy.  We have also decided to stop Thursday classes.  Our schedule did not have enough time at home.  I have been working the last week on setting some goals for the rest of the year, and a schedule.  I find I struggle in this area.  There are certain things that I want to teach, and we just do not have the time.  I wonder how a teacher in a classroom full of kids can possibly accomplish all of their goals for the year.  I do know that what we are doing at home, is more than what they would end up getting at their local brick and mortar school, but I still would like to accomplish more.  I know the amount of days Nathan would be missing because of his migraines, bad days.  And I know that on his bad days we still do some schoolwork which is more then what he would be getting if he was in school, but man on those days, I do find it frustrating that we can not get accomplished what we had planned.  I guess I need to learn to be more flexible.  This can be my goal for this year I guess, not to be so rigid, and learn to go with the flow.  I find that I can do this in the moment, but then after the day is done, I am left going but we didnt get his or that done!  ahh what am I going to do, now we are behind...  So the schedule does have some wiggle room, but probably not as much as we need. Maybe by the time next year comes along I will be able to leave more wiggle room, but there will be so many more books I will want to read... and so much more science to learn...

Ok seriously frustrating, google docs sucks... 3 hours later and I finally have a pdf up of our rest of our year schedule.  They keep changing how you share, and it really was 20 steps before hand anyway.  But now I seriously had to make my own embed code.  I really had to learn some code to get it on this page...  Now I can say I know how to code...

Here is our schedule for what is left of the year




This will be our new weekly schedule.  I seriously can not figure out how teachers fit everything in!

So how did the first week go?

Pretty great, sure there were some struggles getting back into it, but I think we were all ready to get back to routine.  It was a very short first week.  We started on Tuesday with only 1 hour of school work, we had to take jeff to the airport.  Wednesday another short day, we have physio/hockey and CSOPA.  Thursday, was a full day, and we managed to get a lot accomplished.  We started working on our Canada Timeline books, we decided to make one that is the same as our History of the World timelines.  Genevieve loves loves loves doing these timelines.  We completed a lesson in My side of the Mountain, and we completed Math, and Latin.  I talked with both Nathan and Genevieve on the importance that we complete at least 1 lesson of math every day for the rest of the year, we are not allowed to skip any days.  I would like Nathan to finish the algebra with physics book and I would like gigi to complete her text this year, if we do a lesson a day, we should have 5 sick days :)   I did have to speak to Nathan a few times about his effort.  He was wanting to do it just for the sake of completing the assignment instead of doing a good job.  Genevieve was also giving me a little attitude on Friday, turned out she was really sick oops...

Painting on the Canadian flag for our tittle pages